Read Days of Infamy for Free Online

major with a history minor. His folks thought he should have studied accounting instead. But he was a second son, a kid brother, and Roger showed plenty of aptitude and eagerness for the family construction business when—if—Dad ever decided to retire. So, while disappointed, Oscar’s folks weren’t furious. They let him do what he wanted.
    It was hard to be furious at Oscar anyhow. He had not a mean bone in his body. An aw-shucks smile made girls’ hearts melt. He’d studied coeds at least as much as Chaucer and Herodotus, and he’d got good grades in them.
    As a graduation present, his folks gave him a trip to Hawaii. They booked him into the Royal Hawaiian, right on Waikiki Beach. The grounds were splendidly landscaped, with coconut palms and banyan trees insulating the great pink pile from the encroachments of the outside world. The room ran twenty dollars a day—this when millions would have got down on their knees and thanked God to make twenty dollars a week. Oscar had never had to worry about money—and he didn’t worry about it now.
    Next door to the Royal Hawaiian stood the Outrigger Club, which since 1908 had been dedicated to the art and science of surf-riding. The proximity of club to hotel was the reason Oscar went from new-minted baccalaureate to bum in the course of two short weeks. He watched in open-mouthed awe the first time he saw men glide the big surfboards over the waves and up onto the white sand of the beach.
    â€œBy God, I’m going to try that!” he said. Nobody at the Royal Hawaiian took any particular notice of the remark. Quite a few visitors said they wanted to learn to ride the surf. A good many of them actually did it. A handful did it enough to start to know what they were doing.
    The next morning, Oscar was out in front of the Outrigger Club half an hour before sunup. It didn’t open till eight. The man who let him in smiled and said, “Hello, malihini . You look eager.”
    Malihini meant stranger or tenderfoot. Without the smile, it might havebeen an insult. Oscar wouldn’t have cared if it were. He nodded to the man, who was then the same shade of brown he would later become himself. “Teach me!” he said.
    He learned to ride the surfboard on his belly, and then kneeling, and then, at last, standing. Skimming over the waves was like nothing he’d known in all his life. It was as if God had given him wings. Was this how angels felt? He didn’t know about angels. He did know this was what he was meant to do.
    He was supposed to go home in two weeks. He cashed in his return ticket instead, and moved to digs much less impressive—and much less expensive—than the Royal Hawaiian. He stretched his money as far as it would go, to stay in Hawaii as long as he could. His only luxury (though to him it was a necessity) was more surf-riding lessons.
    When the money he got from the ticket ran out, he worked on the docks for a while, and surfed almost every waking minute when he wasn’t working. Before long, he didn’t need to take lessons any more. Before much longer, he was giving them. By the time winter came, he was as good as men who’d been riding the waves as long as he’d been alive.
    That was what he thought, anyway, till he followed the Outrigger Club members’ winter migration to the north shore of Oahu. There he found waves like none he’d seen, like none he’d imagined, near Honolulu. They rolled down across the North Pacific all the way from Alaska. And when they came ashore at Waimea and some of the other spots the club members knew, some of them were as tall as a three-story building.
    Riding waves like that wasn’t just sport. If it went wrong, it was like falling off a cliff—except then the cliff fell on you. More than once, he came to the surface gasping and gouged and scraped from a tumble against the sand. He lost two front teeth when somebody else’s